Arizona Daily Wildcat

Student newspaper serving the University of Arizona

The Arizona Daily Wildcat is a student newspaper serving the University of Arizona. It was founded in 1899 as the Sage Green and Silver. Previous names include Arizona Weekly Life, University Life, Arizona Life and Arizona Wildcat. Its distribution is within the university and the Tucson, Arizona metropolitan area. It has a distribution of 20,000. The Arizona Daily Wildcat was named Best College Newspaper by Princeton Review's THE BEST 361 COLLEGES, 2006 EDITION.

The May Day mystery is a series of cryptic advertisements taken out annually on May 1 (May Day) in the Arizona Daily Wildcat since 1981. The ads are described as a "mess of equations, historical figures, artwork and symbols", and are signed with a "smiley face" figure. The first known ad appeared on May 1, 1981, featuring the quote "Long live Chairman Mao" written in simplified Chinese. Over the years, the ads grew in complexity. The ads usually appear on the most expensive advertising areas of the newspaper. They share a theme of revolution and social unrest, and featured about 14 languages including forms of Chinese, Afrikaans and Hebrew. In 1997, UA alumni and web designer Bryan Hance started a website to document the ads. Hance claimed he has since been contacted by an organization known as the "Orphanage" who provided him with more clues and cryptic messages. In 1998, following an ad featuring many cryptic messages in Hebrew, a group of students accused the ads of anti Semitism and demanded to know the source of the ads. The ads were, for several years, placed by Robert Truman Hungerford, a Tucson based lawyer and a UA alumni. He is a "self described anti social hermit" with an interest in philosophy, theology, cryptography, languages and medicine. In a 2003 interview, Hungerford claimed to be the legal counsel for an organization who placed the ads, and refused to name the organization. Hungerford also claimed to be a member of the "Orphanage".